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| Photo by Alon Reininger |
| Click photo above to view gallery. |
In 1988, Life magazine ran a series of pictures by Alon Reininger depicting the growing crisis of the AIDS epidemic. Until that time, AIDS, for many Americans, was simply a “gay disease,” an affliction affecting big cities like New York and San Francisco. But one of Reininger’s pictures—a portrait of AIDS patient Ken Meeks taken in 1986—gave the disease a frighteningly human dimension. Meeks died only three days after the picture was made, but his image went on to become an emblem of the epidemic. “I did not want to do just a story about Ken Meeks. Ken was a character in a bigger story,” says Reininger. “He knew that I was taking his picture in a broader context. It just happened that I took a picture of him in one particular situation that struck a raw nerve with a lot of people.” Reininger ended up winning numerous awards for his AIDS work, including the World Press Premier Award.
In a sense, that story overshadowed everything else he’d ever done, which was a great deal. Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1947, Reininger got his start in photojournalism covering the 1973 Yom Kippur War for United Press International. In 1976 he became one of the founding members of the Contact Press Images agency. Over the years he has covered social and political unrest around the world, from southern Africa to Central America to China. He spent the 1990s working in California, covering social issues like immigration, crime, and education. Today he is based in Los Angeles.
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